Solar Storms Read Free Page B

is
possible the sun could just be out of whack.”
    Emanuel chuckled. “Out of whack? Is that a
technical term? It’d have to be pretty whacked out to produce a storm of this
magnitude.”
    Sophie yanked her shirt over her head and pulled
her hair into a ponytail. “I don’t know, Emanuel.”
    “Guess we’re going to find out.”
    “I guess so,” she said.

    THE COOL blue glow from the
command center bled out into the white hallway. Sophie and Emanuel followed the
light into the room, which was beginning to fill with tired looking staff
members.
    Tsui greeted them at the bottom of the stairs. “Ah,
you’re back. Let me introduce you to a few people. This is Saafi Yool, our
primary engineer,” he said, pointing to a tall, skinny Somali man monitoring a
hologram in the corner of the room. The man nodded and returned to the blue
image.
    “He’s not big on words,” Tsui said and turned to Ed,
who was still staring at the same screen he’d been watching when they had
arrived. “Ed, get over here.”
    The man slowly rose and pulled up his sagging
pants.
    “Sorry, my team isn’t very…social,” Tsui said,
pausing to find the right word.
    “We meet again,” the man said, wiping the remnants
of another taco on the side of his pants before reaching out to shake Sophie’s
hand.
    “Likewise,” she replied, hesitating before quickly
shaking his hand.
    “Ed doubles as the team’s lead engineer and the
satellite expert. But basically he just monitors the new equipment NTC bought
us.”
    “Sure do,” the man said.
     “You can meet the others later. We need to get to
work. I will show you to your stations.”
    Sophie and Emanuel followed Tsui through the rows
of computers to the center of the room, where the same holographic image of the
sun they had seen earlier rotated on a slight axis.
    “Emanuel, there’s not much you can do until
something happens, but you can get familiar with your station and the software
in the meantime,” Tsui said, motioning him into a booth lined with monitors.
    “Sophie, you on the other hand will be assisting me
in monitoring the storm. First, I’d like you to look over our calculations.
I’ve checked them, but a second set of eyes couldn’t hurt.”
    She followed him down the second set of stairs to
another row of computers. Ed sat at a station on the end of the row, working on
another taco.
    “Amy, please load station 15 with our most recent
calculations and projections,” Tsui said, sliding past Ed’s bulk with
difficulty.
    Sophie squeezed behind the obese scientist and took
a seat at her station. With a deep breath she flicked the three monitors to
life. She was anxious to see how long they had before the massive CME.
    A steady flow of data raced across the screen. She
scanned it quickly and then opened a folder labeled “NASA Satellite 41 MD’s.”
Flicking the screen, the folder blossomed into a host of entries.
     
    3.1.2055
    23:55 Hours
    Event - MD 491
     
    She consumed the info rapidly, stopping when she
got to the GPS coordinates. For some reason, Tsui and his team hadn’t used the
magnetic disturbances in their calculations. Looking closer she realized something
was very wrong with the data. The subsequent coordinates indicated they had
originated millions of miles away from the sun.
    “Impossible,” she muttered. “These can’t be
correct”
    But they were correct, and the farther she dug, the
more of the entries emerged. They had all been collected from the new NTC-funded
satellites. Not only were these new satellites state-of-the-art, they were very,
very accurate.
    She examined the entries line by line.
     
    3.4.2055
    21:51 Hours
    Event - MD 496
     
    4.14.2055
    20:01 Hours
    Event - MD 499
     
    For the moment she decided to assume the data was
wrong, that the satellites had somehow managed to capture incorrect readings.
They had to be; it was the only explanation. Otherwise Tsui would have included
them.
    Wouldn’t he?
    She entered it into her